The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [71]
Meanwhile, according to Clark, Sam had never recovered from the loss of her partner, Jill, whom she’d met on a white-water-rafting vacation in Arizona, and who’d run off with someone else after living with Sam for seven years. Sam insisted she was still willing to try again, although she claimed vaguely to friends that she’d been about as lucky in love as the Barefoot Contessa. Few in Emerald had any idea what she meant by this analogy, or that the role in the movie had been played by their fellow Tar Heel, Ava Gardner.
In her good-bye note, Jill said their biggest problem had been Sam’s mother, Grandee, whom Sam wouldn’t institutionalize, and whom the town wouldn’t arrest (even after the widowed Mrs. Peregrine had smashed out the glass of a whole block of front windows on River Street, including Nickerson Jewelers). It was only after Grandee had attacked Sam with a pair of hemming shears (Sam still had the scar on her forearm) that the latter was persuaded to put her mother in a nursing home.
By then, according to Jill’s note, “the damage was done.” Jill left their new condo and Now Voyager, the travel agency on the floor beneath it that they’d started together. She flew off to Belize to start a cave-canoeing business with somebody else. She took their Djuna Barnes first editions and left Sam the tropical fish. Sam had to buy her out of the condo and the business; while shocked by the price Jill demanded, she told her lawyer, “Just do it.”
That winter was a tough one. Sam’s mother was evicted from her convalescent home for hitting a nurse with a concrete elf and Sam had to move her back into Pilgrim’s Rest to care for her. Grandee died of a stroke a year later, a few weeks after biting a piece out of Sam’s shoulder.
Some people in Emerald knew that, between them, Jill and Mrs. Peregrine had broken Sam’s heart, but few felt free to offer their sympathy since (a) they had never admitted that Sam and Jill were anything more than business partners who happened to live together above their travel agency and (b) had never publicly discussed the fact that Sam’s mother was insane.
Sam sat alone in her condo night after night thinking that happiness would always hover outside, like a hummingbird, never resting.
Then one day her old friend, Clark Goode, returned to Emerald. He came back to hire someone to run the family’s business, Goode Landscapes, in which he had no real interest. He was at loose ends since resigning from the Chicago hospital where he and his ex-wife Ileanna had done their residencies. It seemed to Sam that Clark, withdrawn, listless, had resigned from life itself. She knew the feeling.
Running into him one night at a grocery store, and seeing that he had nothing in his cart but frozen pizzas and a bag of doughnuts, on the spur of the moment she invited him to join her for dinner. Clark looked into Sam’s cart, at the packages of shrimp and monkfish, mussels, sausage, and chicken. “I’m making paella,” she told him. “It’s nuts, cooking for one. Go pick up some bread and stuff for a salad. Not iceberg. Come on over, why not?”
They made the paella together and sat in Sam’s condo eating it, watching the old classic comedy The Wrong Box.
“I’m laughing! I’m laughing out loud.” Clark told her, amazed.
“Me too. I can’t believe it,” Sam said.
A month went by. Clark didn’t leave Emerald. The old friends became better friends. Sam told him that their evenings together were the best part of her life these days.
“Me too,” he said.
When her woodstove set fire to her